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Saturday had been a sunny spring day. Sunday was different; it was raining at 10am when we arrived. Phil and myself (Tom) made a start on the berm for the triangle entrance. As the rain turned to sleet and then snow we were cheered by the arrival of John Speed. We moved the last of the bricks from the strore near the pond to be used as the base for the berm. It was bitterly cold and the ground turned into a quagmire within minutes. That didn’t deter Richard, Tony La Porte and Jez from making the trip down to the trail. We marked out a constant radius curve for the new berm and then dug up the old trail. Meanwhile the triangle bypass line took shape just before the third berm. The mud was used to build up the berm. Conditions were so sticky that the compactor stuck to the mud, so we ran itover hardboard sheet on the berm surface. This worked well. With the snow turning back to rain we were joined by Sarah Bailey who commented that it always rained when she was present. Jerome joined us a little later despite falling off his bike a few days previously and bruising himself. We had a 2x2m Hippo bag of gravel a few metres away and that was soon used to build up the berm and the triangle bypass link. The last few barrow loads of gravel were used to fill in a short muddy section in the middle of the previous section. Because the trail curves back on itself this was actually only a few metres away as the crow flies (or any bird that follows a straight line). |
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The four photos below were taken in the new triangle section. This will be opening in early April. |
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By 4pm we’d finished our work in the triangle entrance and decided that we could squeeze a few other jobs in. Three of us moved over to the short link section between what we call “motorway1” and “motorway2”. This bit of trail had been resurfaced in January 2011 but the line was in the wrong place by a few feet. So we shifted it. After being joined by the rest of the group then we finished off the last of the gravel from the previous day and resurfaced the section at the end of “motorway1”. We moved the line slightly to take advantage of the rock slab. We also dug out the ground to make the drop a bit more interesting. |
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With Sarah and John present that took the total number of people who’d turned up to trail building over the weekend to 25! A brilliant result. We surfaced 310m of trail in two days and used pretty much all of the material on site. Special thanks to Chris who has taken the compactor back to Brandon Hire after pretty much every trail build day for the last few years. |
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